Where's that Lizard! - Transcript08/04/2000

Dave Sims: Mozilla is the open source project that grew out of
Netscape to develop a standards-compliant browser and has develop into a little
more. Last week the Web standards project posted an open letter to Mozilla
developers, criticizing the project's delay and accusing it of ceding the
browser market to Microsoft. Mozilla advocates have responded strongly on the
Web to the accusations and they have gone to lengths to point out all the things
that have been accomplished. Tim, can we start with you? Can you tell us why the
Web standards group published the open letter and summarize what it said?

Tim Bray: Well, the Web standards project tries to represent the
interests of the people who build stuff on the Web. And our basic mission in
life is to berate the browser vendors when they do standards supporting things
and -- I'm sorry, berate them when they don't do standards supporting things --
and praise them when they do standards supporting things, and I think if you
look at the history we have both berated and praised any particular browser
vendor you may care to name.

Right at the moment, the biggest problem in the browser space is that there's
only one out there in the minds of a distressing number of people. We profoundly
believe that the most important thing that the Internet needs is to move towards
a more standards-based approach to doing business. And I'm just not sure, we're
just -- we just don't see how that's going to happen if there's only one browser
out there. And you just hear a distressing number of people saying, "Oh we're
just designing for IE."

Now we have been supportive in the past of the Mozilla project and I think we
still are, but no matter how wonderful it is, its absence is part of the big
standards problem right now on the Web. We don't have a deep, deep understanding
of all the internal dynamics of the Mozilla project, and I personally don't
fully understand the reasons for all the delay in the arrival. But it's just a
huge, glaring fact staring us all in the face that that delay is a big, big, big
problem.

Sims: David, you've been close to the development team. Maybe you
could tell us a little about that. It does look to people on the outside that
the project started out to develop a browser and that interesting things have
been happening within, but there's still no browser.

David Boswell: Absolutely, I agree. I certainly understand and you did
mention earlier, Tim, that you don't have a clear understanding of what actually
is going on internally with Mozilla, and I think that confusion is pretty much
the base for where the WaSP [Web Standards Project] criticism, the criticism
that recently was published in the Suck.com article and pretty much all the criticism that you see around the Net lately comes from this confusion.

Mozilla is not Netscape, and so it's often you see people refer to Mozilla
and to Netscape interchangeably, and I think that pretty much leads to more
confusion by confusing the issue. Basically, there's two different kinds of
Mozilla developers. There's either a Netscape developer or a non-Netscape
developer. All the Netscape developers are solely focused on releasing Netscape
6. All the non-Netscape developers for Mozilla have other agendas, and for
instance in the Suck.com article it pretty much said Mozilla is dead largely
because it's bloated and it's lost its focus. Just to pick one thing -- for
instance, it said, "Trying to add XSL support to Mozilla is one of the reasons
why -- or one of the explanations why -- Mozilla has lost its focus." But this
is something that's being done by an outside developer not employed by Netscape,
and just because XSL might not be working right now, that's not going to delay
the shipment of Netscape 6 in anyway whatsoever, because Netscape has the
ability to take what it wants from the Mozilla code base and use it for what it
wants to do.

Sims: Tim, I remember when Mozilla was first announced in the Web
Standards Project -- if it was called that then, I'm not sure -- but I was
specifically talking to Glenn Davis about the excitement. It was that if they
could get a browser out there that was standards compliant, Web developers would
embrace it and they would sort of drive the engine there and even though IE's
market share might be growing, the developers' building to a standards-compliant
browser would really push the agenda and get people to design to that and also
get people use it. Has that opportunity been lost?

Bray: Oh, I don't think so. I think that -- and let's be fair. At the
moment of all the shipping browser that are actually shipping and deployable,
Internet Explorer is the most standards compliant. So we've got to be fair to
those guys. Having said that, I think that the battle is certainly not lost. I
think that assuming that in the not too distant future Netscape 6 is robust and
deployable and high performance comes out, and in particular if Netscape's
parent organization -- let's not forget who they
are -- get behind it a little bit, we have a very good prospect of getting
back into a two-browser Web, and I think a two browser Web is a better place
than where we are now.

Sims: Um, David and also Derrick a little bit on this, part of the
confusion in these articles has been not understanding what else has been going
on in the project and the reasons for that, and sort of the inability to
separate that from the browser. Can one or both of you illuminate a little some
of the other development that's going on and how it ties with the browser and
the things that don't tie with the browser?

Boswell: Absolutely. What I had talked about earlier about the
division between really who are the Mozilla developers, it's key to figure out
who's driving what. One of the common complaints you often see is that people
are concerned that Mozilla seems to be turning itself into a platform. You often
see, "I just want a browser I don't want a platform."

Sims: That's the part we thought was most exciting.

Boswell: Again, most of the developers are solely focused on
releasing Netscape 6 and it seems to be largely the outside Mozilla developers,
the non-Netscape developers, who are driving this whole platform concept. For
instance Active State, with their
Komoda interface Zope with their Zope Studio
are really using the new Netscape technologies in a new way, that Netscape or
the Mozilla organization never really intended them to be in the first place.

Dave: Well, if the projects are somewhat separated, why is it that the
browser project has on its own taken two years?

Boswell: It's taken two years because that's simply how long it has
taken. I don't think the arguments about "all these other things are getting in
the way and are delaying it" are very valid. To take Zope for a example, just
because Zope as an outside developer is using Mozilla technologies in a new way.
It's really not delaying the Netscape shipment in any way.

Derrick Story: To talk about Netscape specifically for a second.
David, what is the price for having a multi-platform browser as opposed to a
browser that is designed specifically for each of the different platforms. Is
that a high price? And then also, to be standards based, to have XML and the DOM
actually integrated into the browser. Are we seeing those things as part of the
delay?

Boswell: It's funny, one of the things that originally was
started to be the biggest timesaver has turned out to be the least in terms of
from the outside what attracts the most criticism is being the biggest delay.
And that is XUL, the XML base user interface language. Originally that was
started to cut time dramatically for creating front ends for Mozilla and/or
Netscape on different platforms. The way 4.x and all previous browsers -- all
previous Netscape browsers -- were created is the front ends were created
specifically with platform-specific code, so if you have Netscape that runs on
Mac, Linux, and Windows, you'd have three different development teams writing
pretty much the same interface using three different languages.

So XUL is a way to do this where you created one user interface that was used
on any number of different platforms. So it did start out to be a labor-saving
device and that is what it's turned out to be. Although I don't think I'd say
the best way. Mike Cornall, when he wrote a piece on Linux Today had a
really good quote that I wanted to mention, and he basically is saying that
application platform capabilities that people are mentioning came out of a lucky
coincidence of open source development, good design, and far-sighted developers.
And again, Netscape never set to create a platform. They set out to create a
browser. It's the outside developers that are kind of turning this into
something else that wasn't envisioned originally.

Dave: Let me ask a question to Tim about that actually. Tim, your open
letter is addressed to Netscape actually, and the people who have responded
strongly is sort of the Mozilla team as a group. Do you consciously not make a
distinction between Netscape and Mozilla?

Tim: I think that it's possible that that's a symptom of our -- of the
world's poor education of the dynamics, the internal dynamics that David has
been describing. On the other hand, based on what he said, it sounds like we
addressed it to the right people.

Dave: Hmm, given the response.

Tim: No, no, I mean from what I've been hearing hear it sounds like
that if pressure needs to be applied, it specifically needs to be applied to the
Netscape side of the host.

Boswell: I don't necessarily agree with that, because I believe my
argument is that Netscape has not been delaying the project with all these
external projects and that Netscape, specifically Netscape 6, is not bloated.

Bray: Well, you'll notice that we haven't specifically been
complaining about the external projects. We are specifically saying, "Look, we
really need there to be another standards-compliant browser out there," and I
don't think we're trying to micromanage how Netscape or Mozilla or the
combination should go about making this happen. We're just pointing out that the
market is already suffering, and that there is further grave danger apparent if
this doesn't happen soon.

Sims:: And to wrap this up, let me ask that question, David, the
question that's always asked. When can we expect a user-level
standards-compliant browser out of the project?

Boswell: Well, again Mozilla is not Netscape, so I can address this
two ways. Netscape has publicly stated that they are going to release Netscape 6
by the end of the year. It's August already, so we really only have, at most,
two or three months to wait. You can argue that that's soon enough or not soon
enough, I guess that's very subjective. Mozilla on the other hand, has a
different agenda. I'm not intimately familiar with what their plans are but I
know that they are going to release a 1.0 when they feel like it's ready, and
it's not necessarily going to be before or after Netscape's release. It'll be
when it's ready.

Dave: All right, well, thank you both. I thank you all three of you
for joining me. Tim Bray, thank you. David Boswell. Derrick Story. That's this
week's O'Reilly Network Open Source Roundtable. Thanks for listening.

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